Anyone that knows ANYTHING about actulators please help me

[losiboy]

How do I make an actulator??? I got all the stuff I need at radio shack. Just need to know How to put it together

[briant]

this is very difficult to explain! check out the picture posted at www.jps.net/schauer/tyco1.jpg (http://www.jps.net/schauer/tyco1.jpg) and www.jps.net/schauer/tyco2.jpg. (http://www.jps.net/schauer/tyco2.jpg.) You can see the actuator on the tail. -Brian

[losiboy]

Please help, I really need to know, my dad and I built a ruber band plane and it needs actulators

[losiboy]

Please help me

[briant]

The actuators are not super easy to build, but if you have a little patience you'll likely be successful. Find an old battery powered Quartz clock. Take it apart and remove the little coil of wire. Wrap the wire in a coil around a pen or something until it weighs about 1 gram. Apply some light glue and let it dry a while. Remove the coil from the pen and attach it the fixed side of your rudder near the hinge line. Buy the little rare earth magnets from radio shack. Take a peice of 28AWG copper wire and bend it around a nickle. CA the magnet to one end of the wire. You should have a half circle of wire with a magnet at one end. Align the wire such that the magnet swings through the coil. The magnet should extend through the coil about 2 mm. Attach the other end of the magnet arm to the moving rudder. Hinge rudder with strips of thin paper. It should return to center with assistance. Hook up your coil to the leads on the RX and you are in business.! Let me know if you run in to trouble. -Brian

[cartwrigh]

Originally posted by losiboy:
How do I make an actulator??? I got all the stuff I need at radio shack. Just need to know How to put it together

I started out by unwinding the coil in the canned heat car. I stretched it out and then measured it. It turned out to be about 44 feet long. I then used the wife's sewing machine and wound the coil on a plastic bobbin. It was heavy and measured about 15 OHMs on my antique VTVM. It was too big and too heavy but flipped one of those tiny rare earth magnets from Radio shack right out of the coil. That is up vertically. Next I went out and looked in my junk and found some spools of 33 and 34 and 37 AGW wire from my days of re winding slot car motors (the 60's). I wound several more coils on bobbins and they all worked well. Next I made a mandrel on my lathe from Teflon. I followed the drawings in the issue of RCMicroflight about the Canned Heat Car conversion. I made several more coils with the wire from the three pack of wire from Radio shack. Using the smallest guage wire in the pack I started winding smaller and smaller coils until I had one so short and light it had very little power. At this point I knew that I had passed the optimum size. I did not use thinned epoxy like the article said but used CA instead to glue the coils. Just make sure your mandrel is something that the CA won't adhere to. If you don't have access to a lathe you can shop around for a piece of Teflon rod of the approximate seize. The closer fit to the magnet size, as long as you have adequate clearance, the better. You can find Teflon washers of adequate size at your local pluming supply house. They are faucet washers in certain design faucets. You could wrap a wooden dowel with wax paper or saran wrap and put the washers on and use a variable speed drill anchored to the work bench to wind coils. My theory is that if you can build models you can do anything! Hope this helps.
Bill